Opinion: A lesson on disenfranchisement

Richard Muti is a former mayor of Ramsey and currently serves on that town’s school board. He has taught American government and politics, writing, criminal justice and history at three New Jersey universities. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, not the Ramsey Board of Education.

CITIZENS in 61 Bergen County towns need not concern themselves with voting for or against local school budgets this Wednesday. Their right to vote on school budgets, which consume two-thirds of property taxes, has been stripped from them by their boards of education or municipal governing bodies, with little public notice.

A 2012 New Jersey law allows school board elections to be moved from traditional April voting to the first-Tuesday-in-November date shared by other local, state and national elections. Since that law was enacted, 517 school districts, 95 percent of the total, have made the switch.

The incentive to make that switch? A provision of the law ends school budget voting for districts that move to November, so long as property tax increases are no greater than 2 percent.

Just nine municipalities in Bergen County and two in Passaic County have stuck with April voting, thereby preserving for their residents the right to vote on school budgets.

The two reasons most often cited for this lemming-like rush to November are greater voter participation in the established November election cycle and cost savings achieved by canceling the April election. Rarely do school boards mention their primary motivation: eliminating all risk of a school budget defeat by eliminating the school budget vote.

November elections do draw more voters, but not, apparently, to school board races on the same ballot. The massive move by school boards over the past two years to shift their elections to November has had little, if any, effect on the number of voters participating in those school elections.

County clerks have relegated board candidates to ballot positions so remote that voters are either overlooking that aspect of the election or simply ignoring contests about which they know little.

Bottom of the ballot

In last November’s election, Bergen County voters had to get past gubernatorial, state senate and assembly contests, a sheriff’s election, candidates for three freeholder seats, municipal council elections, two proposed constitutional amendments with interpretive statements and one county public question before finally reaching candidates for local school board races. Most voters didn’t make it that far.

A Haworth resident noted in a Record letter to the editor that just one-third of voters who cast ballots for borough council bothered to vote for school board candidates. “The fewest number of voters who went to the polls,” she said, “actually cast a vote for the people who control the largest amount of the property taxes we pay.” The official Haworth tally supports her. About 1,150 residents voted in the council election, but only 415 for school board — slightly more than one-third.

Similarities

I spot-checked five other Bergen County towns, all of which mirrored the Haworth experience to varying degrees.

About 2,600 Waldwick voters weighed in on the council race, while fewer than 700 voted for school board. The Dumont council race attracted about 4,300 voters; the school board election, less than 1,000. About 3,250 Tenafly residents voted for council candidates, compared to 2,000 for school board. In Fort Lee, about 6,000 voters cast ballots for council, while fewer than 2,300 voted for school board. Mahwah residents cast 4,900 ballots for council, but fewer than 2,600 for school board.

Participation in the school board elections in these six towns — actual voters as a percentage of registered voters — ranged from a low of 9 percent in Dumont to a high of 22 percent in Tenafly, far below the 35 percent to 48 percent turnout for other races on the same ballot. In fact, school voting was not much different from the
levels encountered across the state in school board elections of the past, when April was the only voting month ... and when citizens still had a say in how their tax money would be spent.

But voters ignoring school board candidates in November is just part of the problem. A more troubling concern is that politics may be contaminating those nonpartisan elections, despite efforts by county clerks to insulate school races from other contests.

According to Larry Feinsod, executive director of the New Jersey School Boards Association, some board candidates felt that “political parties became a factor” in their November 2012 races.

“In municipalities where Democratic candidates won election,” Feinsod stated in School Leader, NJSBA’s bi-monthly magazine, “the school board candidates whose names appeared to line up with the Democratic slate tended to win. In places where Republican candidates received the highest number of votes, those school board candidates whose names appeared to line up with the GOP tended to win.”

The cost-savings argument is another weak reason to deprive residents of a school-budget vote. Ridgewood recently made the move to November and will save $30,000, according to Schools Superintendent Daniel Fishbein. With Ridgewood’s school taxes approaching $85 million, one has to wonder whether its residents are happy with losing their voting rights on the budget to achieve annual savings of three-hundredths of one percent of their tax bill — less than five dollars for the average homeowner.

Fishbein promised the same care in the budget process as before, but I’m not sure that any school board can sustain that promise. The need to justify a district’s spending plan and put it to the test of a public vote, or suffer the consequences ... well, that sharpens the senses, so to speak. And sharpens the pencil.

One Bergen County school trustee, quoted in the Suburban News after the last election, embraced the no-budget-vote benefit of November elections. “It safeguards the school budget from being used as a tool for residents to express dissatisfaction with the schools,” she said.

But that’s just the point, isn’t it? Shouldn’t folks who are paying 90 percent of the bill for public education in most suburban communities have a direct way of expressing their dissatisfaction with how their districts are being run? Sure, they can elect board candidates who share their views, but gaining a board majority takes years. Voting down a school budget gets immediate attention.

An outraged public

The experience in Ramsey, my hometown, is a case in point. In early 2009, the board ended a protracted contract fight with its teachers by agreeing to an 18 percent increase in total salaries over four years, without obtaining a single cost-saving concession in return ... and it did so during the height of this recession, when many Ramsey families were undergoing tremendous financial hardship.

The public was outraged, and residents went to the polls in unprecedented numbers in April 2009 to express their “dissatisfaction.” Thirty-four percent of eligible voters turned out, sending the school budget down to a resounding defeat.

The Ramsey board got the message. In its next go-around with the teachers’ union, the board held out until it achieved sweeping health insurance changes at a reasonable cost. And, in the last three budget cycles, the board has delivered to Ramsey property taxpayers, the folks paying the bill, the three lowest school-tax-levy increases for the general fund in at least the last 29 years — as far back as we have records.